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Politics Is a Dirty Business. I Ought to Know.

I don’t do stakeouts. There’s no sitting in my car outside some seedy motel with a camera, waiting for a candidate and his mistress to emerge. For one thing, voters don’t care about that kind of stuff—at least not like they used to—and campaigns usually avoid using really personal information for fear it’ll backfire and make them look ruthless.

But more to the point: It’s not a good use of my time. “Oppo” may be a dirty word in politics but trust me: We investigators aren’t the dirty ones–and the reality is, documents are where you really strike gold. I’ve worked on more than 170 campaigns at every level—mayoral, state legislative, gubernatorial, congressional and presidential—and you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve found spelled out in the public record, where anyone could unearth them. Like court records and newspaper archives. I also learn a lot just by talking to people who know the candidate. Basically, opposition research is a little like catching a fish—lots of tedium, but when you realize you’re onto something it’s the same flash of excitement and adrenaline as when you feel that first firm tug on the line.

And unfortunately, there are plenty of fish to catch in American politics. Candidates for public office, as I’ve learned over the last 13 years, have nearly endless amounts of chutzpah; even now, it never ceases to amaze me what people think they can get away with. One candidate for the state legislature in New Mexico, where I live and do most of my work, was a retired sergeant with the county sheriff’s office who had a good shot at winning—until I found a restraining order. I pulled that file, which said he had threatened to kill his wife and told her he knew how to make her body disappear.

Would you vote for him?

Neither would the people of Valencia County. He lost in a landslide.

Another candidate who had been personally recruited by New Mexico’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez, to run against the state Senate majority leader—who Martinez hates—turned out to have a restraining order on his record too, and the file said he had taken his ex-wife’s car and jewelry, cancelled all her insurance without notifying her and told her that he would do “any and everything” to hurt her. Despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars Martinez poured into her guy’s campaign, the Senate majority leader won re-election comfortably.

Then there was the candidate who, years earlier, had been charged with felony child abuse for leaving his five-year-old daughter alone by the duck pond at the University of New Mexico while he attended class. A few years later, when someone called the police to report that he was yelling and screaming, the officers found Nazi propaganda and articles about the Unabomber in his apartment. He, too, lost by a large margin.

The one that shocked me most happened eight years ago. I’d been hired by the New Mexico Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee to do oppo on a slate of Republicans in state races. When I ran a court records search on one of them I found a felony case for child abuse.

The case had been dismissed without explanation, but I drove to the courthouse and pulled the file, which said the candidate’s teenage daughter told her school nurse that her father beat her with a belt and repeated the story to the police, who then questioned the father. He admitted it and said it was for her own good—she had talked back to her parents, and sparing the rod spoils the child. He knew that, he said, because he’d been a minister.

The police charged him, but the daughter later recanted and refused to cooperate. The craziest part was that the former minister had been recruited to run specifically as a “family values” conservative. I took the documents to a political reporter at the afternoon daily, who covered the story, and the guy got trounced.